Server clusters are commonly used to provide failover and high availability of information to clients. The use of a server cluster allows for transparent failover to clients so that any server failure is transparent to applications requesting server operations on clients. Server clusters can be useful in shared file systems to provide access to file information to several clients in a network. However, issues may arise when the shared file system utilizes a stateful protocol, such as the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. When a server in a server cluster fails, some stateful protocols do not provide a way to transfer client state from the failed server to an alternative server. Also, file access protocols that do provide for storing some state information do not provide for different components to store different state information.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that embodiments have been made. Also, although relatively specific problems have been discussed, it should be understood that the embodiments should not be limited to solving the specific problems identified in the background.